Criminal human trafficking has always been a serious topic, it caused huge damage to families and societies. There are thousands of men, women, and children who fall into the hands of those criminals every year. The Global Report on Trafficking in Persons published in 2020 by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) declared that over 50,000 cases of human trafficking have been reported globally in 2018. However, because of the difficulty of identifying and detecting human trafficking, it is possible that the number of hidden victims is much higher.
As per the report, females continue to be the majority of the victims of trafficking in persons.
“In 2018, for every 10 victims detected globally, about five were adult women and two were girls. About one-third of the overall detected victims were children, both girls (19 per cent) and boys (15 per cent), while 20 per cent were adult men.”
Over the past years, the proportion of child victims has been growing steadily.
“In addition to sexual exploitation (72 per cent of girl victims) and forced labour (66 per cent of boys), children are exploited for begging and forced criminal activities, such as drug trafficking, among other crimes. ”
Those heart-wrenching statistics made me think about a recently widely discussed news in China.
At the end of 2021, in Jiangsu Xuzhou Feng County, a story of a father named Zhimin Dong (董志民) who raised 8 children had been widely known locally. Zhimin Dong soon created a 'hero dad' image on the internet by filming Vlogs, he not only caught attention but also got many kindhearted donations. On January 27, 2022, a Chinese Tiktoker published a video filmed at Zhimin Dong's house. In the video, Dong was dressing and feeding the kids, while his wife was chained and locked in a dilapidated hut. The lady, known as Yang, was unkempt and shabby. In the middle of a cold winter, she was wearing no shoes, and her food was scattered on the ground. The video shortly went viral, and people were worried that the 'chained lady' is a victim of human trafficking and domestic violence. From January 28 to February 7, several government departments participated in the investigation and published three reports which stated that there is no human trafficking involved and that Yang was chained because of mental diseases. However, the public was deeply sceptical about the statements. Under the pressure from the public voice, the special investigation team established by The People's Government of Jiangsu Province delivered a final result on February 17, confirming that Yang was a victim of several human trafficking crimes. To date, Yang has been taken to the hospital for treatments, and Zhimin Dong and other six people have been arrested on suspicion of human trafficking crime, a total of 17 Communist Party officials have been dismissed and punished.
The case of the 'chained lady' made me spontaneously wondering the present state of human trafficking in China. The data used for analysing is collected from a well known non-profit non-governmental Chinese website, Baby Come Home (宝贝回家), which helps Chinese citizens find missing relatives. The data contains over 4,000 cases where the missing people were successfully found, including information on the case ID, reasons that the people were missing, the age of the people when they were missing, regions where the people were missing and found, how long have they been lost, and the date of when they were found. The data was scraped and preprocessed (such as cleaning, subsetting, translating, etc.) with the R language, visualizations are produced using Python.
As shown in Figure 1, the act of human trafficking is often clustered around the younger phase of the victims, babies under one-year-old appeared to be particularly targeted. Figure 2 below is the distribution of the lost period of the victims, the plot suggested most of the victims were trafficked away from their families for over 20 years. Figure 2 below is the distribution of the lost period of the victims, the plot suggested most of the victims were trafficked away from their families for over 20 years. The long tail of the distribution was carefully reviewed and proved to be real stories, not outliers. In the cases, an elder was kidnapped and trafficked at the age of 14, his posterities found his family after he passed away, at that time he was missing for 90 years.
Human trafficking is becoming a serious social problem in China, especially child trafficking. The causes behind the crimes could be highly complicated, as pointed out by the head of the anti-trafficking project. One of the core reasons could be that younger people are vulnerable and easier to be controlled. At the most important age of building personality and values, exploitation of child victims would likely mislead them. For example, lack of understanding of them being 'sold' and etc. The relationship between age and lost period is shown in Figure 3, which verified the above statement in a way. Although no significant relationship was observed between the variables, the missing period of older victims appeared to be shorter.
The traditional social concept of preferring boys over girls also contributed to human trafficking. For thousands, agriculture is fundamental to survival, it has been playing an important role in the development of China. Typically, males are stronger than females naturally, thus having the ability to earn more to support a family in the past. This thought has been planted deeply in some Chinese people's minds for a long time. This feudal ideology not only leading the trafficking of boys but also the abandonment of girls.
LI Gang et al. (2017) mentioned that the most unsafe provinces are in the South Central, the East, and the Southwest parts of China. Fujian, Guangdong, and Henan tended to have relatively significant 'self-loop', whereas the general routes followed a "trans-nearby-regional" rule. Such statements could be verified by those produced choropleth maps and network diagrams (Figure 4 to Figure 9).
As shown in Figure 4 and 5, the choropleth map of China with red colours revealed the number of victims lost in each province, whereas the purple coloured map gave information about where the victims were found. In both maps, a deeper colour indicated a higher number of victims. From the red map, Guizhou, Sichuan, Yunnan, and Guangdong appeared to be high-risk provinces for human trafficking. On the other hand, the purple map implied that Fujian, Henan, Guangdong, Shandong, and Hebei were areas where most of the victims were trafficked to.
Figure 6 provided the network of human trafficking routes visualized on the basemap of China, thinker edge indicated higher number of victims. It suggested a overall trend of the human traffcking crimes are less involved in the North, Northeast, and Northwest parts of China (see Figure 7 for the reference of regions of China). Unfortunatly, the direction of the flow could not be be labelled in the plot.
Figure 7. Reference on Boundaries of Regions in China, from Wiki Page
Within the limited data, the statistics of high-risk provinces for human trafficking are shown in table down below. Guangdong has been appeared twice in the table, indicated a significant 'self-loop'. Fujian and Henan had a larger population of victims found, yet a relatively insignificant population of lost victims. This circumstance might reveal the existence of a large 'market' in those provinces, that is, where the main 'buyers' were.
From the directed network diagram (Figure 8) which shows the movements of human trafficking flows between provinces, there are a couple of features that could be easily observed. Notice that, deeper colour means a higher number of victims in the transportation. Firstly, provinces that have been mentioned before in previous discussions involved deeper colour flows as expected. Another meaningful finding is, that some provinces that were unobtrusive in the previous section also established apparent flows, such as Hunan and Jiangxi. A possible reason could be that Hunan and Jiangxi being the nigbours of Guangdong and Fujian. Thirdly, every province had a self-loop.
Figure 9 shows a filtered version of the network diagram contains only significant flows. Guizhou and Sichuan as the top 2 areas where the victims were lost, appeared to be the biggest "export" provinces with many edges came out of them. Among the multiple links, the color of the connections from Guizhou and Sichuan to their nighours areas were tend to be deeper than others.
A critical question here is what could be the reasons for the Southern regions of China becoming the "root" of the crime. According to Zhuang Ping, a lecturer of Sociology from Shandong University, a major cause would be the unbalance of the economy. The geographical environment and difference in living standards played an important role in leading the direction of the human trafficking flows. After the reform and opening up (the 70s), the growing inequality in the economy has been aggravating the eagerness of people in poverty areas for better lives. The criminals usually exaggerated the living standards of other cities to trap people leave with them, the lack of knowledge and experience of people in poor areas often allows the human traffickers to take advantage.
Human trafficking is a horrific and heinous criminal act, it is a massive violation of human rights. Behind those statistics and numbers, there are people suffering from physical and mental torture, being manipulated or threatened. Unquestionable, all countries have been taking action to combat human trafficking. It has been determined to be the world's fastest-growing crime. Aside from governmental support, learning to protect ourselves would be another essential way.
It was fortunate to see that the 'chained lady' was eventually rescued, yet there are thousands of 'chained lady' around the world that have not been known, we are still waiting.